What Does the Future of the Call Center Industry Look Like?

According to Future Market Insights, the call center market is expected to reach a value of US$ 27.1 billion in 2022 and surpass US$ 55.5 billion in 2029.

This is a 10.8% CAGR between 2022 and 2029.

What Will Drive This Growth?

• The rising adoption of cloud-based call center solutions and services
• Integration of new contact center technologies such as artificial intelligence, customer relationship management, knowledge management, helpdesks, and ERPs
• The surge in demand for omnichannel call center solutions by integrating channels like  web, email, chat, text, video, and social

Cloud Adoption

A few years ago, organizations were skeptical about migrating their on-premise call center to the cloud, but things have changed drastically in the past two years.

Even organizations in the BFSI domain have migrated their on-premies call centers to the cloud. This was necessary as they had to move their workforce to work from home, which was not easy with on-premise solutions.

Now, every customer wants cloud call center software as it offers the flexibility they desire. So, most traditional call center providers have also started migrating their offerings to the cloud.

Cloud makes it easier for organizations to scale up and down the number of resources based on the needs of their projects or campaigns. The entry barriers are minimal as you are not talking about CAPEX investments. You are only paying on a per-minute basis and per your use.

Integrations

Organizations wanted to provide the best possible experience to their customers, more so during the pandemic. What did they have to do?

They pushed forward on their digital transformation initiatives. They wanted a single view of their customers irrespective of the channel where the customer interaction has taken place. They got together their CRMs, helpdesks, knowledge management, ERPs, and the call center infrastructure.

This allowed them to track every customer interaction and providing organizations with an opportunity to provide the best possible experience to the customers.

The customer interactions across channels and platforms brought together a ton of data. How do you make use of them? Organizations integrated analytics and artificial intelligence into the mix to leverage the power of the data and started deriving tremendous value out of them.

Today, they are able to get actionable insights.

Most organizations already had some form of CRM, helpdesk, knowledge management, and ERP, but they remained in silos. Most of them did not have a call center to support the customers, and the customer experience was handled by different teams depending on priority.

With the availability of cloud call center infrastructure and the benefits that they derive out of integrations, organizations have started upping their investments in call center infrastructure.

Omnichannel Solutions

When you look at the call center infrastructure, you have multiple channels – web, email, chat, text, video, and social.

With cloud call centers, it becomes effortless to integrate all of these channels, providing an omnichannel customer experience. It doesn’t matter which channel you interact with; the agents would be able to access all of your interactions from their unified dashboard.

Also, the customers can seamlessly switch from one channel to another without difficulties.

Cloud makes it easy for all the channels to be integrated, ensuring omnichannel capabilities.

North America and the Asia Pacific will be key markets for the call center industry. There is a lot of traction on digital transformation and the growth in the number of call centers in these two markets.

There is a rising demand for solutions like voice broadcasting, interactive voice response (IVR), intelligent call routing, and automatic call distributions, which will drive further growth.

Cloud will be the way forward, as customers want it that way. The cloud infrastructure can easily handle everything a customer expects to have in providing great customer experiences.

Every organization is moving towards providing a personal touch to their customers while offering their support and services, with omnichannel capabilities. I foresee a lot of action in the retail, consumer goods, and the BFSI space.